1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to information processing such as coordination of information processing resources. In particular, the present invention relates to a high-speed information processing apparatus, a high-speed information processing method, and a high-speed information processing program used for information processing, such as collaboration and coordination, of various information processing resources, including CAD (Computer Aided Design) data, existing at remote sites, e.g., another continent, through the modeling and systematization of the information processing resources.
More particularly, the present invention refers to a series of mechanisms for: growing high-speed central processing, for example, at a large-scale machine center; wide-area parallel collaboration with, for example, servers and clients distributed at a plurality of remote bases; simultaneous high-speed data transfer to a plurality of bases that enables a huge amount of data distributed at such remote bases to be manipulated in a collaborated manner through the same operation as when local data is manipulated; and definition and control of base-to-base application collaboration/parallel operation management. In other words the present invention relates to a business model based on these mechanisms functioning as a hyper framework. Furthermore, the present invention relates to a mechanism for transferring three-dimensional coordinate information, mouse events, etc., to a processing server at high-speed to improve responsiveness in server-side dialog processing in an existing environment, such as responsiveness in the ASP (Application Service Provider) method where an application is located at the center and dialog is performed at a remote client.
2. Description of the Related Art
One of the main goals in product development is to release high-quality products to the market as soon as possible. To achieve this goal, a large-scale, high-quality processing environment, like one realized with a virtual factory, is required. To build such a processing environment, CAD, CAE (Computer Aided Engineering), and CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing), which realize virtual development, high-speed simulation, and early-stage evaluation of products, are required.
To build a product development environment, it is also necessary to build, for example, an ASP environment which can provide services for achieving high-speed processing of various applications free of temporal, geographical, and scale restorations. To build an environment to carry out high-speed processing of distributed information processing resources, such a collaborative environment is essential that supports collaboration and dialog with remote sites in the same manner and operational feeling as local operation. The realization of such an environment now extends beyond the product development realm to PLM (Product life cycle management) ranging from product development to product disposal. This PLM activity is ultimately expected to help the conservation of the global environment.
The manipulation of processing resources distributed over a known local network will now be described with reference to FIG. 1, which shows the manipulation of processing resources distributed over a known local network.
Information processing centers A, B, C, . . . X functioning as bases constituting a known local network are interconnected via a network 2. The information processing centers A, B, C, . . . X each include many processing resources. More specifically, the information processing center A includes, for example, resources aa, ab, and ac as the information processing resources. If a client 4 is to use, for example, the resources aa, ab, and ac distributed in the information processing center A, a standard access method is used. No problems arise with the data transfer rate, resource operability, and responsiveness for the utilization of resources within a short range, namely, the utilization of information processing resources within the information processing centers A, B, C, . . . X.
An ASP operating procedure for using information resources between information processing centers will now be described with reference to FIG. 2, which shows a processing procedure between information processing centers.
In a known ASP environment, the user's information processing center A includes a computer 6 that performs information processing and a file (ua) 8. The information processing center B includes a counterpart computer 10 and a counterpart file (ub) 12. As described above, the information processing centers A and B are interconnected via the network 2. ASP server processing 14 is performed in the information processing center A. The ASP server processing 14 includes tool selection and Web (World Wide Web) conversion 16, which includes a file system 18, CAD tools 201 and 202, etc. Information transfer processing includes processing 22 of, for example, various FTP (File Transfer Protocol), and the processing 22 requires a plurality of work files 241 and 242.
Operating procedures for the ASP environment will be described below. Procedures (1) to (3) are shown in FIG. 2 to clarify the relationships.                (1) Required file transmission by a plurality of information processing centers        
This file transmission includes, for example, file selection, compression, transfer, decompression, etc.                (2) Selection of a required CAD tool, startup of the tool, start of operation by specifying a file        (3) Reception and updating of a result file after CAD processing, and exiting the tool        
Reception of the result file includes file selection, compression, transfer, decompression, etc. and updating includes management of editions, etc.
An Internet-based collaborative design method has been proposed in the form of a system that allows both advisee and adviser to browse and select the latest catalog data free of temporal or geographical restrictions and allows design drawings to be produced in real time (Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2001-195438). In addition, there has been proposed an integrated communication system that provides work files on the Web to allow two parties residing at remote sites from each other to exchange views based on CAD drawings (Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2002-140277). Furthermore, a system that centrally manages distributed data in a common database has been proposed as an example of a system that achieves coordination of information resources (Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2002-269330).
More fast and extent collaboration is required due to a growing amount of processing and consequent demands for high-speed processing and global utilization of resources. With the known access method, however, simultaneous high-speed transfer of data to a plurality of information processing centers is not possible, and consequently practical resource utilization is difficult due to distance and a limited transmission band. With the known access method (FIG. 1), for example, the resources aa and ab, which are limited in their own information processing centers A, B, C, . . . X, are used collaboratively only between one information processing center and another. What is the worse is that the known access method is supposed to transfer only a small amount of data. Moreover, with the known access method, frequently repeated transfer processing cannot be avoided to achieve large-scale collaboration among information processing centers. This repeated transfer processing is time-consuming because it involves pre-processing, post-processing, and transfer operation, making practical operation difficult. Furthermore, individual processing at information processing centers is not efficient.
It is customary that to centrally manage engineering applications, such as large-scale CAD applications, data at clients is transferred to a server, which then carries out high-speed processing, and after the processing, sends back the processed results to the clients. This type of central processing takes a very long time to repeatedly transfer many large files between servers and clients before and after processing, and therefore, is significantly inefficient. Display of results of processing, if it is a long-distance dialog such as a dialog with a site on another continent via the Internet, also suffers from a large loss in transfer time, and a quick response cannot be expected for such processing.
No suggestions or proposals about these problems or about solutions to these problems are found in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2001-195438, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2002-140277, or Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2002-269330.